Our Diablo II: Resurrected Build Tool Is Now Live!

DiabloFans has leveled up and distributed our skill points! We have officially expanded our build tool to include Diablo II: Resurrected and will also soon support Diablo Immortal as well! The Diablo franchise has an incredibly bright and evil future ahead of it, especially in light of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and our team is dedicated to supporting all current and future games. Diablo II: Resurrected will be receiving new content updates and support for the foreseeable future, and our tool will be updated to reflect any changes or additions to the game.

You can jump in and start creating builds here, and be sure to leave us any suggestions or feedback regarding the build tools that you may have!

Diablo II: Resurrected | 1.12 - PC PTR Patch Notes

Originally Posted by Hooley (Official Post)

PTR OVERVIEW

The Public Test Realm (PTR) is a special realm where we can test balance, bug fixes, and other enhancements we make in Diablo II: Resurrected. This test environment is available to all owners of the game, who can play a critical role in testing features and sharing their feedback to improve the overall experience for all players.

 

To acquire access to the PTR, open your Battle.net launcher application and select the Diablo II: Resurrected tab. Above the “Play” button and under the “Game Version” text, select the dropdown menu and click “Public Test Realm.” Now you’ll be able to download and install the test version of the game. Once finished, simply select “Play” to launch the PTR. As normal updates are automatically downloaded by the Battle.net launcher application, so too is the PTR.

 

The focus of the first PTR will revolve around fixing database issues and making the online environment more robust and flexible under high-volume conditions. This test will be imperative, as it will assist us in stabilizing the gameplay experience ahead of the implementation of Ladder rank play.

PATCH NOTES

A new Diablo II: Resurrected patch is in development and now available for testing. To share your feedback or report any issues, please post in the PTR Feedback and PTR Bug Report sections.

 

Please note that the below patch notes only include changes currently available for testing on the PTR. While many of these changes may also be available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch in a future patch, the PTR is PC-only and only reflects changes coming specifically to that platform.

GENERAL

• Character saves are now saved on the regional database, rather than the global database, alleviating database stress and mitigating server stability issues

DEVELOPER COMMENTS: To help us test these database changes, we encourage players to play and log in and out A LOT. Furthermore, it would be helpful if players could creator characters of different types (Hardcore, Classic, etc.). This will assist us in gauging the fix on our end. We’ll be providing players with level 99 characters for their first journey in the public test realm.

The Darkening Of Tristram Returns January 3, 2022!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

 

Diablo’s anniversary is right around the corner, along with the Darkening of Tristram event! Whether you’re a series veteran craving nostalgia, or a newcomer hungry for your first taste of the franchise’s past, this annual loving homage to the earliest days of Diablo is for you.

 

Read on for more, including a closer look at the anniversary dungeon and its unique rewards.

 

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Stop the Cultists

Your journey begins on the trail of a group of mysterious cultists causing trouble in Sanctuary. As you hunt them down in Adventure Mode, you’ll uncover clues leading to a portal into Tristram’s past, and the terrifying darkness that took hold of the town so many years ago. . . .

 

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Explore the Cathedral

Follow the clues and you’ll soon find yourself in a realm of glorious RetroVision™, where an all-too-familiar cathedral looms. Explore the depths and you’ll discover familiar enemies and iconic items, all brought to life in the Diablo III engine. Meanwhile, deep beneath the catacombs, the Dark Lord himself awaits any intrepid adventurer who dares to challenge him. . . .

 

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Discover Precious Loot

What is a Diablo game without shiny new loot to call your own? Completing activities in the anniversary event yields unique transmogrification effects, achievements, portraits, pets, and more.

 

While some rewards are easy to find, others may have you scouring every nook or unlocking every achievement before you can get your hands on them. Can you earn them all? There’s only one way to find out!

 

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Your Journey Begins…

Exclusive rewards and challenging enemies await you, but they won’t last forever! The cultists will appear on December 31 at 4 p.m. PST, and the portal opens January 3 at the same hour. Both parts of the event end January 31 at 4 p.m. PST.

 

Enter the dungeon, reap your rewards, and survive the evils within—or die in the process, never to be heard from again. . . .

Diablo IV Quarterly Update | December 2021

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Itemization & Paragon Updates
• Visual Effects in Diablo IV

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Hello and welcome to the year-end Diablo IV Quarterly Update.

 

We hope you enjoyed October's deep dive into sound design, the atmospheric ambient tracks, and peeking behind the scenes of how game sounds are made.

 

Since our last blog, we've been hard at work adding new content and systems to the game. We’ve made big strides, with every build of the game containing a host of expanded content, new art, balance changes, and other iterations. In fact, the team is currently playtesting an internal release of the game that represents a significant milestone. We have much to share with you today as a result, so let's dive in.

 

First, Lead Systems Designer Joe Piepiora will discuss updates to key elements of itemization. These include the return of +Skills on items, a new way to interact with legendary powers, and some early work on targeted drops. After that, grab a warm beverage and a comfortable chair as he walks us through Diablo IV's completely new end-game character growth system: the Paragon Board.

 

Next, Lead Visual Effects Artist Daniel Briggs will describe the philosophy that allows our talented VFX team to create huge explosions and eye-popping skill effects while keeping the game clear and readable, even when there are many players and monsters on the screen at the same time. He'll also go into detail on how Diablo IV's new game engine has allowed us to make frame-by-frame combat more precise and nuanced, while leveling up our effects to take advantage of the new lighting system. Finally, feast your eyes upon a plethora of skills across all four announced classes that show off our skill-driven death system.

 

We hope you enjoy this update and look forward to your thoughts and reactions. We'll be back in the new year and are ever grateful to have you with us on this journey.

 

-Joe Shely,
Game Director, Diablo IV

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The Itemization of Diablo IV

Greetings, Heroes of Sanctuary!

We are thrilled to once again dole out a whole heap of info on the state of systems and endgame in Diablo IV. I’m Joe Piepiora, the Lead Systems Designer, and today I’m going to share some details on two major features of Diablo IV: itemization updates and our plans for Paragon.

+Skill Rank Affixes

In Diablo IV, the +Skill Rank affix returns. As players invest points in skills, they grow in potency, and finding items with +Skill Rank can speed that along. As a bonus, when the player equips an item with +Skill Rank for a skill they haven’t learned, they will have access to that new ability. It’s a great way to try out new skills before you’re able to invest in them. Getting a lucky drop that nets you a skill you’d like for your build ten levels before you would otherwise have access to it is a huge boost!

 

Legendary and Unique Items

As Joe Shely discussed back in our December 2020 update, Legendary and Unique Items remain a core part of the Diablo item chase experience. We’ve made a foundational change to Legendary items in Diablo 4 by allowing legendary powers to appear on multiple item slots. Now, if you’re searching for a legendary power, like Martial Arts—which enhances the Barbarian’s kick ability—you may find it on rings, chestplates, or helmets; there’s no need to hunt for a specific item type any longer.

 

Now, the real question is what happens when you find a power on an axe when you really wanted it on a ring? Or you found a great legendary amulet, but can’t use the power? Well, that is when we get to introduce our new friend, the Occultist.

 

The Occultist can extract a legendary power from a Legendary item, crystallizing it into Essence while destroying the item in the process. That Essence can then be implanted into another Legendary item, overriding the power that was present in the item at that time. Essence material can also be stored and used at a later time.

 

Unique Items cannot be modified in this way, keeping their fantasies intact—and as their name implies—unique.

 

Hunting for Items

Sanctuary is a vast world, filled with forlorn trails through werewolf-infested forests, withered heaths crawling with cannibals, and fog-choked graveyards crawling with the restless dead. There are plenty of enemies and monsters for the hero to encounter. Each of these monsters seem to enjoy collecting certain types of items and will be somewhat more likely to drop those items than others. While bandits are fond of Maces, Crossbows, and Boots, if you’re hunting for a new pair of Pants, you'd do well to kill some of the Drowned instead.

 

In past discussions, we’ve received feedback that it seems deflating for so much of a character’s power to be delivered through the gear that they have equipped. Customizing and planning a character feels less rewarding if it doesn’t play a big role in how the character performs in combat. We hear you loud and clear, and in Diablo IV, we have placed a stronger emphasis on character power that is earned by all the little decisions you make while leveling up and exploring the world of Sanctuary. While we aren’t talking about everything we have planned for character power today, I’m happy to talk about one feature in particular, the Paragon Board.

The Paragon Board

In Diablo IV, we have placed a heavy emphasis on build customization, ensuring that you can have plenty of control over how your hero grows. The Paragon Board unlocks for each class at level 50 and is a distillation of this focus. Your hero begins their journey through the Paragon system at the central starting tile of their class’s intro board, and from there, you make selections radiating outward. Once your hero reaches a gate tile, you’ll choose which new paragon board you would like to attach to at that location. The desired outcome is a personalized set of bonuses that will empower your hero and honor your dedication to their progression, that will remain fun to tweak and adjust over many playthroughs.

 

There is a lot to take in with the image below, so I’ll walk through some aspects of what we’re looking at here.

 

The Paragon Board is comprised of many fixed tiles. As the Barbarian earns experience, they will earn Paragon points, which are used to unlock a connected tile. There are a few varieties of tiles that I want to walk through.

Normal Tiles

These tiles are straightforward, providing a small but meaningful stat boost. Normal Tiles are connective tissues that can be found throughout the board and are quite common.

Magic Tiles

Magic Tiles are found in clusters throughout the board and provide a potent, more diverse set of benefits. As you might expect, they are less common than Normal Tiles, but are still plentiful.

Rare Tiles

Rare Tiles offer significant boosts in power. Upon entering the Paragon Board for the first time, these represent great goals for players to chase, particularly once you’ve narrowed builds down towards highly specific goals. Rare Tiles also have additional powers that unlock once the hero has raised an attribute to a sufficient level, requiring some choices to be made when plotting your path through the board.

Legendary Tile

After the first Paragon Board, each new board has a single Legendary Tile that can be found at its center. Legendary Tiles impart a new Legendary Power to the character that earns it.

 

Glyphs and Sockets

A Socket is a special tile that can contain a Glyph. Glyphs are items found throughout Sanctuary that, when embedded into a Paragon Board, confer various benefits based upon the number of active tiles within their radius.

 

Glyphs can also be leveled up by delving into some particularly dangerous dungeons. Leveling up a Glyph extends the radius of their effect, allowing each one to draw power from or impart power to even more active tiles.

 

Gate Tiles and Board Selection

A single Gate Tile lies at each edge of the Paragon Board. As you progress through the Paragon Board, you will eventually reach a Gate Tile, which upon unlocking will allow you to select a new Paragon Board to attach to your existing Board. Each of these boards has unique Tile layouts, new Magic and Rare Tiles, and a new Legendary Tile at the center.

 

The Paragon Board is extended from these Gate Tiles. Upon selecting from the Paragon Board list, you will be able to place the board down, connecting it to the newly unlocked Gate Tile. You may also optionally rotate that newly placed board.

 

We’re hard at work on these and other features that we’ll be able to share more about in future updates. Though for now that’s all from the systems team. Thanks for reading and please share any feedback you have on social media, Reddit, or our forums! We’ll see you in Hell!

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Visual Effects in Diablo IV

Thanks for joining us! My name is Daniel Briggs, and I am the Lead Visual Effects Artist for Diablo IV. The VFX team gets to contribute to features across the entire game, but today we will focus on the work we do to support combat. VFX artists collaborate with designers and other art teams to create strong thematic identities for the hero classes and breathe life into monsters, in order to deliver the visceral, gruesome combat players have come to expect.

 

VFX is an integral part of the combat experience for all Diablo games. With Diablo IV, we wanted to step up the fidelity of our effects using Physically Based Rendering (PBR), as well as better support the core pillars of gameplay: deep hero customization, itemization, and combat readability.

Visual Effects - Philosophy

Every effect plays a role in the final composition of our game. It is important to understand the context of an effect, and how it best serves your experience.

 

One of our core values at Blizzard Entertainment is “Gameplay First,” and this drives a lot of the artistic decisions we make while developing visual effects for the game. Moment-to-moment gameplay is the focal point within the composition of Diablo IV: it should draw your attention. To achieve this, we must consider things like player skills, monster telegraphs, traps, damage areas, and character states. The visual effects for each of these components must be readable in all areas and lighting conditions, so you can quickly understand what is happening and use that information to make informed decisions.

 

In the chaos of combat, you’ll need to be smart—seeing a Legendary item drop is exciting, but picking it up is not as important as reacting to a monster’s attack that can one-shot Hardcore characters! Our goal is to balance the primary, secondary, and tertiary reads to help you understand what is happening. To do this, we reserve visually loud FX for powerful skills, like ultimate abilities, while weaker skills meld into the background. Each class has abilities that range from low to high in costs, cooldowns, and power. In tandem, classes have a range of visual intensity that increases with skill power.

Combat Improvements

To enhance the feel of combat, we have made several improvements to the way damage is applied in our game. In previous iterations of Diablo, an area-of-effect (AOE) or melee skill would be a single area of damage that is applied on a single frame. Thanks to our gameplay engineers, we can now animate target areas (what we call payloads) over multiple frames, which allows us to line up the animated target areas with the animated VFX that play out.

 

For example, Whirlwind in Diablo III is a cylinder shape surrounding your Barbarian, which applies damage every couple of frames at a rate based on your attack speed. In Diablo IV, Whirlwind is an animated pie shape that animates with your character. AOEs expand outward with time, and melee swings match the motion of your weapon. Animated target areas improve accuracy to the way we apply damage in Diablo IV; it makes combat feel more impactful, and monster ragdolls more visceral. Animated payloads also add a subtle timing aspect to a variety of skills.

 

Additionally, we have revamped the way we apply hit effects to monsters, so impacts flow with the direction of a spell or melee attack. We use data defined in the animation and animated target area to find the most accurate place to hit a monster, and where to apply a directional physics force to the ragdoll. In so few words, if you hit a goat-man in the knee, the blood spray would come from his knee. The physics force applied to the goat-man’s knee would send it flying as if you kicked the legs out from under him.

 

Visual Effects - Casting and Receiving Light

In Diablo IV, we use a PBR (physically based rendering) lighting model, which means our materials look and react to light in a realistic way. This approach brings huge rendering improvements, but this can be counterintuitive to what a player might expect for class and monster abilities. As an example, think about what a campfire looks like in full daylight—pretty lackluster, right? Next, imagine what a dust cloud or smoke plume would look like in the dead of night—it'd be nearly impossible to see. To account for this, we’ve built an engine and shader library that lets us break PBR rulesets in artistic ways. This ensures important gameplay moments shine through as clearly as possible while keeping immersive elements full PBR so they can realistically react to lighting.

 

Previous iterations of Diablo use primarily “unlit” particles, meaning they are not affected by the environment’s lighting. These particles give you amazing control over what the art will look like: what you paint is what you get. The downside to unlit particles is that art may look too bright in a dark dungeon, or VFX color schemes may not feel cohesive within every environment.

 

In Diablo IV, we use lit VFX that meld into the environment’s lighting, creating a more immersive experience. Using Whirlwind as an example (seen in the video above)—in bright daylight, the blade reflects light from the sun. In a dark dungeon, it will reflect more subtle light sources, like torches. The dust kicked up by the skill is also lit by the environment, so it blends artfully into the world.

 

If we rely solely on environment lighting and follow true PBR rules, then gameplay readability is muddied, particularly in dark environments where a weapon swing would naturally be hard to see. To counteract this, many VFX have emissivity to cast light onto the environment. Several ultimates in our game will even allow you to change the weather and lighting of the environment for a limited duration. We strive for a healthy balance of gameplay clarity and thematic immersion.

 

Dynamic Player Skills

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the art looks like if the gameplay isn’t fun. One of the goals for creating player skills is to ensure that the System Design team has a variety of modifiers they can utilize to create meaningful skill trees, class mechanics, Legendary items, and Paragon Boards.

 

Choices should affect more than your character’s stats. Once we have a class skill we are happy with, the VFX team adds the ability for developers to dynamically change the size, intensity, and duration of a skill. The visual intensity of a skill will increase as you stack upgrades and items that increase the power of that ability.

 

In addition to these skill modifiers, we create variants of abilities that completely change the functionality of a skill or the damage type that it deals. These skill variants can be changed by the scale, intensity, and duration modifiers as well. This allows variants of skills to be affected by a wider range of legendary modifier groupings. Your skill tree/paragon decisions, along with the items you have equipped, will make your character look and play differently from other characters of the same class.

 

Each of these ranges is handcrafted by an artist to ensure the art holds up at all supported sizes and intensities. We do not uniformly scale every piece of an effect when changing size and intensity; we modify things like spawn rate, velocity, emissivity, and color ranges to make certain the art still fits in the world of Diablo.

 

We want your character to look incredible as well! Our items are built in a way that allows us to easily apply weapon buffs to any weapon in the game. Not only will your legendary items do awesome things, but they will make your character look amazing as well. Here is an example where we apply the same fire and poison buff to several weapons in our game.

 

Skill Driven Deaths

Sanctuary is a dark, gothic world filled with horrific monsters that do horrendous things. To survive in this bleak landscape, you must be merciless toward your enemies. We are bringing back a popular feature from Diablo III: skill-driven deaths. This system allows you to decapitate, bisect, freeze, shatter, eviscerate, and burn your enemies, to give a few examples.

 

With our new PBR pipeline, we can make blood, viscera, and gore even more realistic by having it react properly to the lighting of an environment. Every monster is built with a skeletal and muscular structure used for killing them in brutal ways. If your character is in the thick of combat, they will be covered in the blood spatter of nearby monsters. Over time, your character’s armor will transition back to being spotless.

 

The Sorceress studies the art of elemental magic. They slow enemies with cold before freezing them solid and shattering them to pieces. They strike their enemies with stunning bursts of lightning, causing bodies to pop and sizzle. Enemies collapse to the floor and char to the bone as the Sorceress engulfs foes in fire.

 

Some examples of death types that Sorceresses can trigger:

• Freeze/Shatter - Break frozen monsters into pieces
• Char - Singe the corpse of a monster with lightning
• Burn – Scorch the monster’s flesh, leaving the remains of a charred skeleton

The Barbarian takes pride in their physical capabilities. Their arsenal of weaponry makes them deadly in close combat. With the power of their ancient bloodline, Barbarians crush foes into piles of gore or send them flying across the battlefield. Their brute strength is equally matched by their speed and ferocity as they unleash fury on the battlefield, dismembering limbs from all that stand in their way.

 

Some examples of death types that Barbarians can trigger:

• Crush – Flatten a monster under the weight of a heavy object
• Decapitate - Remove a monster’s head from its body
• Cut In Half - Sweet
• Break Lower Limbs- The monster’s lower body is shattered, splitting several of their joints

The Rogue is dexterous; their attacks are methodical. Monsters are often oblivious to their presence until it is far too late. A precise stab from one of their daggers, or a well-placed arrow, is enough to bring most monsters to the floor. The Rogue finds the most opportune time to take on a fight, and they imbue weapons to gain an advantage. Shadow magic can make a superb distraction, but their shadow clones are as deadly as their blades.

 

Some examples of death types that Rogues can trigger:

• Eviscerate – Spill the insides of a monster
• Shadow – Shadow energy deteriorates the life from a monster's flesh.
• Freeze/Shatter - Break frozen monsters into pieces
• Poison – The monster’s skin melts off leaving a heap of muscle and bone
• Flay – Flay the skin from an enemy, leaving the muscle structure intact

The Druid is one with nature magic. They conjure storms and call down lightning on their enemies. They control the battlefield with gusts of wind as their animal companions tear the flesh from monsters. Druids manipulate the earth with nature magic, molding it to their will and bludgeoning enemies from afar. As their enemies approach, they see the innate power of the Druid, shapeshifting fluidly between an agile werewolf and a hulking werebear.

 

Some examples of death types that Druids can trigger:

• Roadkill – The monster is crushed by a moving object, leaving a smear of blood on the ground
• Devoured– The monster's flesh is eaten away by a swarm of ferocious bites
• Lightning Gib – Lightning causes the monster’s body to pop, exploding into pieces
• Maul – The monster’s skin is completely mangled, covering them in blood

That is everything we have to share with you today. It has been a dream to work on this franchise, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to share some of our development process with the community.

Thank you for reading our last quarterly update blog for 2021. I hope you found it exciting and interesting. We are actively listening to your feedback, and we strive to make Diablo IV the dark, gothic game we all want to play. Please continue to share your thoughts and provide feedback on social media, Reddit, and our forums!

Season 25 | 12/17 Hotfix - Now live

Originally Posted by FilthieRich (Official Post)

A hotfix was applied for patch 2.7.2 to specifically address the issue related to Demon Hunters utilizing an exploit to clear high-level content such as Greater Rift 150’s in an unintended way. In addition to the Demon Hunter update, several leaderboards have also been reset to ensure an even playing field for those playing through competitive seasonal content.

 

The past few days have been busy with many players sharing the issues related to this exploit and your feedback/information has helped us release the patch that we have today.

 

We will continue to monitor behavior, leaderboards and messages here to ensure that all is good with this recent hotfix. We appreciate your patience and feedback on the matter. Thank you.

Diablo II: Resurrected Patch 2.4 Highlights | Coming Soon

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

 

 

Greetings, Heroes of Sanctuary. We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight exciting upcoming balance changes, alongside a couple of new features coming in our next Diablo II: Resurrected update! 

PLEASE NOTE: Game content discussed in this blog is not final and subject to change.

QUEST LOG

Ladder Rank Play

Class Balance Changes

Mercenary Changes & New Rune Words

Developer Update Stream

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Prepare to seek your glory. Ladder Rank play is arriving early next year! Our priority for Ladder Rank play has always been for this mode to be a smooth experience. The competitive nature of this feature demands stability as players race towards 99. Our teams have continued to invest time in making the game experience and performance smoother for everyone. We can’t wait for you to begin your climb, but for now, let’s dive into some exciting details around this upcoming feature! 

LADDER RANK PLAY

Like Diablo II Classic, Diablo II: Resurrected will feature four different Ladder modes, including:

 

Version	Description
Standard Ladder	The casual version of Ladder play that encompasses playing with four acts.
Hardcore Ladder	The hardcore (only 1 life) version of Ladder play that encompasses playing with four acts.
Standard Expansion Ladder	The casual version of Ladder play that encompasses playing five acts, as it includes the “Lord of Destruction” expansion content.
Hardcore Expansion Ladder	The hardcore (only 1 life) version of Ladder play that encompasses playing five acts, as it includes the “Lord of Destruction” expansion content.

 

For the first time, players will have the chance to unlock a host of new Rune Words in the Ladder system! To be clear, these Rune Words have never existed in the game before, and they will not be accessible in non-Ladder play like the previous set of Ladder-only Rune Words in the original Diablo II experience. At the end of a Ladder season, players who successfully made these Rune Words will have their Ladder characters be moved into a “non-Ladder” version of the game. Then at the beginning of the next Ladder season, players will make a new Ladder character and start all over again to earn new rewards. Currently, we don’t have specific new Rune Words to showcase, but if you tune-in to our Developer Update Stream (more details below) hosted by content creator MrLlamaSC, you’ll be able to receive a glimpse!

 

Lastly, we’ve been monitoring discussions around Ladder Rank play in the community. The duration of Ladder is an element our team is still trying to gauge as we progress forward, but we’re looking to create the “rush” of a new ladder and find the best timeframe for Ladder rotation that meets your expectations. Presently, we’re considering four months for Ladder Seasons. We’ll continue monitoring the community’s opinion and preference on this front as we approach PTR for Patch 2.4 early next year. 

 

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CLASS BALANCE CHANGES

After so many requests from the community, we’re thrilled to share new balance changes are coming to your favorite heroes in Diablo II: Resurrected! As fans ourselves, we’re just as eager as you to find new ways to play. This is incredibly special, as the last patch to make balance changes to classes in Diablo II was Patch 1.13c, which was released back on March 23, 2010! Now, eleven years later, we’re making new changes to expand character build diversity, and retain class fantasy and specialty! These goals are crucial. We’re reviewing underused skills, assessing casting delays, making tooltip quality-of-life changes, and more to fulfill these goals. 

 

We want to empower you to be creative with the builds you want to play, but we don’t want to “reinvent the wheel” and steer classes from their core purposes. Without diving into the specifics, let’s take a peek at the philosophies behind various Class changes. 

AMAZON

The Amazon's agility and versatility are profound. Generally, we like the current state of the Amazon class and believe her to be quite balanced. Nonetheless, we see an opportunity to improve the Amazon's melee skills. We want to buff the strengths of certain underused melee skills such as Impale and Fend to give more reasons to use them. We are also looking into freeing up synergy requirements for melee skills to give more skill point freedom for other possibilities.

 

Additionally, we are also considering buffing certain skills in the Bow and Crossbow tree to help improve bow gameplay in higher difficulties.

ASSASSIN

The Assassin vanquishes evil from the darkness with great ease. However, for this class, we see an opportunity for the Martial Arts builds to shine brighter. Martial Arts skills can become increasingly challenging to perform in higher difficulties, so we are re-evaluating how to improve generating and spending Combo Points.

 

Furthermore, various Trap skills are not often used. So, we’re re-evaluating synergy requirements to promote more trap builds and damage scaling buffs.

BARBARIAN

The brawn of the Barbarian is unmatched. Nonetheless, we see opportunities to add more diversity to Combat skills. We're looking into adding more possibilities with Combat Skills such as Leap Attack and Grim Ward, while also re-evaluating skill synergy requirements to promote more reasons to spend points on certain Combat Skills.

Additionally, we think Throwing Barbarians can be more viable, so we are looking into enhancing the Double Throw and Throwing Mastery skills.

DRUID

The bestial ferocity of the Druid makes all tremble. With that said, we see exciting opportunities to level up certain aspects of this class. From our perspective, Druid Fire skills are underperforming. We're re-evaluating Casting Delays for Fire skills, exploring improvements to some of their Physical Damage components, and improving synergies. We’re also looking at potential tweaks affecting other Elemental skills that are underused. We want to improve the controls for Arctic Blast too, such as allowing more free form while channeling and no longer locking your targeting onto one enemy at a time.

 

Regarding Summon skills, we believe Summons are weak in high difficulty. On this front, we’re evaluating health gains per level, quality-of-life improvements, damage output, and new synergies for Ravens, Wolves, and Vines.

 

Lastly, we're evaluating improvements to the Werebear skills, primarily focused on synergy improvements.

NECROMANCER

The commander of death sends his foes to an early grave. Like the Amazon, we like the current state of the Necromancer class. Nonetheless, we see an opportunity to improve specific Summons we believe are underused. We're balancing elemental damages of Skeletal Mages and making lesser used Golems more effective.

Additionally, we see opportunities for Bone skill improvements in high difficulty. We’re tweaking synergies on this front.

PALADIN

The wrath of the holy zealot is glorious. Despite this, we believe certain Combat skills are underused. We’re exploring ways to make lesser-used skills (I.e., Fist of the Heavens) more utilized, so players have more reasons to spend skill points to unlock these skills. 

 

We also see an opportunity to scale Offensive Aura skills as well. This includes making improvements to AoE Damage auras to make them more effective at closer range. We also want to improve Thorns so that it can scale better and deal more reliable damage at higher levels. 

SORCERESS

There is no greater master of elemental magic than these mages. We're very satisfied with the Sorceress’s current state, but we see a few of opportunities for improvements. 

Regarding Cold Skills, we believe there can be more diversity with the armor skills (I.e., Frozen Armor, Shiver Armor, and Chilling Armor) for distinctive advantages.

 

We are also looking into adding more build possibilities around lesser used Lightning skills by exploring more skill synergies.

Lastly, we’re also revisiting Fire skills, to improve underused ones, like Hydra. Similar to Arctic Blast, we're exploring making player control improvements to the Inferno skill so that it is less clunky to use.

 

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MERCENARY CHANGES & NEW RUNE WORDS

And we’re not done. Class Balance changes aren’t the only updates players want to see. We’ve seen a lot of feedback from the community around the subject of Mercenaries, and we are making improvements to Mercenaries in a variety of ways. Many players enjoy using the Desert Mercenary, and we want to give more reasons to use the other three mercenaries, so we are looking into improving their skills and stats to enhance their identity and fantasy.

 

New Horadric Cube Recipes, Set Item changes, and new Rune Words are on the horizon! New Horadric Cube Recipes being implemented will allow for upgrading the item quality of Set Items to give more item build possibilities. Set Item changes will update underperforming Set Items, to have more bonuses, giving players more incentive to pursue Partial and Full set items that can complement the skill changes alluded above. Lastly, new Rune Words will be added to complement the Skill and Mercenary changes coming in the update.

 

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DEVELOPER UPDATE STREAM

This blog is just scratching the surface about upcoming changes and features coming in Patch 2.4 PTR (coming early next year)! To learn more, we invite you to join community content creator, MrLlamaSC, Diablo II: Resurrected Design Lead, Robert Gallerani, and Senior Game Producer, Matthew Cederquist, in their upcoming livestream. This broadcast will be both a presentation and an opportunity for members of the community to ask questions. We can’t wait to share more with you then!

 

WHEN:	December 16 | 11:00 AM (PST)
WHERE:	https://www.twitch.tv/mrllamasc

This has been an incredible year for Diablo II: Resurrected. We wish our community a happy holiday season and a happy new year! Thank you for playing our game and thank you for your continued support! 

If you want to learn more about Diablo II: Resurrected, check out our website here, or for real-time updates, follow our official Twitter @Diablo.

Season 25: The Lords Of Hell

Season 25 delves deeper into the darker side of the Nephalem's past, allowing players to embrace evil by infusing themselves with the essences of the Lords of Hell. During Season 25, players will discover and upgrade demonic Soul Shards based on the seven Lords of Hell. by embodying a Prime and Lesser Evil, players will inflict new forms of pain and suffering on the demons of Sanctuary.

These new Soul Shards are socketable items that give players new demonic powers. One of 3 Prime Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Helms and one of 4 Lesser Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Weapons. Each Soul Shard can be upgraded three times using a new seasonal-exclusive consumable called the Hellforge Ember.

Prime Evil Soul Shards

Sliver of Terror 

• Base Power: Your cooldowns are increased by 25%. For every skill on cooldown, you take 12.5% reduced damage and deal 12.5% increased damage.
• Additional Powers:
  • Your attack speed and critical hit chance are increased by 5% for each skill on cooldown.
  • You cast a devastating Ring of Fire after killing 100 enemies.
  • If three or more skills are on cooldown, your lightning and fire skill damage are increased by 50%.

Shard of Hatred 

• Base Power: You deal 15% reduced damage while you have 3 or fewer enemies within 25 yards. If more than 3 enemies are within the same distance, you deal 5% increased damage per enemy (to a maximum of 50%).
• Additional Powers
  • Killing an elite enemy pulls all enemies within 40 yards to where the elite died.
  • Your Movement speed is increased by 50%. Each enemy within 25 yards reduces your movement speed by 10% up to 70%.
  • You now deal 10% increased damage for every enemy instead of 5% (to a maximum of 100%)

Fragment of Destruction 

• Base Power: You move unhindered through enemies. Each enemy you pass through receives Mark of Destruction for 7 seconds. Each marked enemy that dies removes 1 second from one of your skills on cooldown. If the Mark of Destruction expires before the enemies die you lose 2% of your maximum health as damage. Marks are not applied if you are below 35% health.
• Additional Powers
  • You have a 25% Chance to restore 5% health when an enemy dies with Mark of Destruction active.
  • When you apply Mark of Destruction to an enemy, you increase your movement speed by 5% for 7 seconds. Max 10 Stacks.
  • You now leave a trail of fire in your wake that slays enemies with the Mark of Destruction and are below 10% health.

Lesser Evil Soul Shards

Stain of Sin 

• Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. When you kill 50 enemies, you spawn a pool of blood that increases the damage done to elite enemies by 150% and lasts 15 seconds.
• Additional Powers
  • The pool of blood now negates Elite affixes within its area.
  • You gain an additional Rift Progress Orb when you kill and elite pack.
  • The pool of blood now collects Rift Progress Orbs.

Dregs of Lies 

• Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. Your pets deal 25% increased damage.
• Additional Powers
  • Killing an elite enemy reduces all your active cooldowns by 5 seconds.
  • On receiving fatal damage, spawn a shadow that prevents your death, restores your health to 35%, and grants +225 All Resist to all party members while it is active. The shadow only lasts 15 seconds.
  • Each time your pet hits an enemy, your damage is increased by 0.5% for 5 seconds. This stacks up to 100 times. When you reach 100 stacks, the stacks quickly reset to 0.

Remnant of Pain 

• Base Power: Your Critical Hit Chance is reduced by 15%. Attacks against Incapacitated enemies are automatically critical hits.
• Additional Powers
  • Hitting enemies with cold damage has a 50% chance to freeze them. Cold skill damage is increased to frozen targets by 20%.
  • Gain passability while your movement speed bonus is over 50%. When you move through enemies you knock them back and stun them for 2 seconds.
  • When you critically hit an enemy you increase the attack speed all players by 5% for 5 seconds. Max 10 stacks.

Essence of Anguish 

• Base Power: Every time you deal poison damage to an enemy you increase your cooldown reduction and movement speed by 2.5% while your damage received is increased by 5% for 10 seconds. Max 10 stacks.
• Additional Powers
  • Your movement speed and cooldown reduction can be increased up to 15 times by dealing poison damage to an enemy.
  • When you deal poison damage to an enemy they receive 50% increased poison damage from all sources for 10 seconds.
  • Killing an enemy deals the damage done by the death blow to all enemies within 25 yards.

Season 25 begins on Friday, December 10th at 5:00pm in each region. Season 25 goes live on all Consoles world wide at 5:00pm PST, the same time as PC in North America. For timezone conversion, visit this site!

Table of Contents

• Season 25: The Lords Of Hell
• Discord Server
• Haedrig's Gift & Seasonal Rewards
• Seasonal Conquests
• Season 25 Starter Guides
• Level With A Cause
• Challenge Rift Week 233
• Patch 2.7.2 Notes

 DiabloFans Discord

Join us on our Discord server! It's the perfect place for finding people to group with, get your questions answered, and stay up to date on the latest news! You can join our server by clicking on the banner below, or by going here! 

If you don't use Discord you're missing out, but you can also find people to play with by using our forums! 

 Haedrig's Gift & Seasonal Rewards

Completing Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the Seasonal Journey will reward you with three of Haedrig’s Gifts. Each Gift contains a few pieces from one of your Class Sets. Players can only unlock one Class Set in this manner per Season across Hardcore and Non-Hardcore, so choose wisely!

The set you will receive depends on the class of the character you’re playing when you open each Haedrig’s Gift. To collect a full Class Set, you’ll need to open all three on the same character.

Here are the sets granted by Haedrig’s Gift in Season 25:

• Barbarian – Might of the Earth
  
• Crusader – Thorns of the Invoker
  
• Demon Hunter – The Shadow's Mantle
  
• Monk – Monkey King's Garb
  
• Necromancer – Grace of Inarius
  
• Witch Doctor – Raiment of the Jade Harvester
  
• Wizard – Firebird's Finery
  

In Season 17, Blizzard began re-introducing previous Seasonal rewards to make them available to players who may have missed them the first time around. This means that for Season 25, awards originally available from Season 13 are returning to the Season Journey.

Blizzard is continuing to provide new End of Journey rewards as was introduced in Season 17, with two new cosmetic rewards for those who complete the entirety of the Season Journey. These rewards will be the Pane of Tristram Portait and the The Dark Lordling Pet.

 Seasonal Conquests

 Want to prepare your Conquests plans for Season 25? Here are all the conquests you'll face this season!

• Sprinter & Speed Racer
  
• Divinity & Lionhearted
  
• Curses! & Stars Align
  
• The Thrill & Super Human
  
• Masters of the Universe & Masters of Sets
  

 Season 25 Starter Guides

Any players looking to level quickly and get the best start to Season 25 should browse the selection of starter guides from various content creators below! It should be noted that Soul Shards can be dropped for characters who are not yet level 70, and getting one while leveling has the potential to greatly increase leveling speeds.

Ultimate Seasonal Starter Guide:

Class Specific Starter Guide From Bluddshed:

Level With A Cause

Level With A Cause (#LWAC), a coalition of streamers from the Diablo III community, will be uniting once again for a charity fundraising event during the first three days of the Season 25 opening weekend in Diablo III. This marks the team’s 14th event over the last few years. Several Diablo III community members will be holding live-streams during this weekend in support of this charity drive. During these live-streams, viewers will be able to donate to the SaveTheChildren charity organization. 

Level With A Cause was founded prior to the start of Season 11 of Diablo III and has been a mainstay of the opening weekend of each new season since that time. The LWAC team has raised over $91,973 to date for deserving charities such as Save The Children, St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Take This. LWAC hopes to continue to grow and raise even more money for charities in the future. If you are a streamer looking to participate, more info can be found on the LWAC website. As a viewer, you can simply search for LWAC within stream titles on Twitch during the December 10th to 12th event.

​

In the U.S. and around the world, Save The Children gives children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. When crisis strikes, they are always among the first to respond and the last to leave. They do whatever it takes to save children, transforming their lives and the future we share.

You can donate to the Level With a Cause charity event here!

Challenge Rift - Week 233

Challenge Rift Week 233 is live! Because Season 25 begins this Friday, we advise that you DO NOT complete the challenge rift until after you've made your seasonal character! This week the Challenge Rift features two different Necromancer builds and a Demon Hunter build for Asia! If you are curious how Challenge Rift builds are chosen each week, you can view this official blog post!

Patch 2.7.2 Changes

Among many other chances, patch 2.7.2 features several balance changes for the Spirit of Arachyr, Marauder's Encasement, Firebird's Finery, and Bones of Rathma sets!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

Patch Notes

Below you will find the patch notes for the upcoming update for Diablo III, Patch 2.7.2

 

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Seasons

Season 25 introduces a new type of socketable item called Soul Shards. Nephalem can find 7 unique Soul Shards, based on the Lords of Hell, which give players demonic new powers. One of 3 Prime Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Helms and one of 4 Lesser Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Weapons. Each Soul Shard can be upgraded three times using a new seasonal-exclusive consumable, the Hellforge Ember.

 

Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers can drop from anywhere in Sanctuary, but Soul Shards have a higher chance to drop from Bosses. Soul Shards cannot be traded, but can be salvaged or utilized in Caldesann’s Despair. You may only equip one Prime Evil Soul Shard and one Lesser Evil Soul Shard at a time. Lastly, Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers only drop in Seasonal play, and will not transfer to your non-seasonal character when the season ends. For a look into the capabilities for each of the Soul Shard powers look below:

 

Prime Evil Soul Shards

 

Sliver of Terror 

• Base Power: Your cooldowns are increased by 25%. For every skill on cooldown, you take 12.5% reduced damage and deal 25% 12.5% increased damage.
• Additional Powers:
  • Your attack speed and critical hit chance are increased by 7% 5% for each skill on cooldown.
  • You cast a devastating Ring of Fire after killing 100 enemies.
  • If three or more skills are on cooldown, your lightning and fire skill damage are increased by 50%.

Shard of Hatred 

• Base Power: You deal 15% reduced damage while you have 3 or fewer enemies within 25 yards. If more than 3 enemies are within the same distance, you deal 10% 5% increased damage per enemy (to a maximum of 100% 50%).
• Additional Powers
  • Killing an elite enemy pulls all enemies within 40 yards to where the elite died.
  • Your Movement speed is increased by 50%. Each enemy within 25 yards reduces your movement speed by 10% up to 70%.
  • You now deal 15% 10% increased damage for every enemy instead of 10% 5% (to a maximum of 150% 100%)

Fragment of Destruction 

• Base Power: You move unhindered through enemies. Each enemy you pass through receives Mark of Destruction for 7 seconds. Each marked enemy that dies removes 1 second from one of your skills on cooldown. If the Mark of Destruction expires before the enemies die you lose 2% of your maximum health as damage. Marks are not applied if you are below 35% health.
• Additional Powers
  • You have a 25% Chance to restore 5% health when an enemy dies with Mark of Destruction active.
  • When you apply Mark of Destruction to an enemy, you increase your movement speed by 5% for 7 seconds. Max 10 Stacks.
  • You now leave a trail of fire in your wake that slays enemies with the Mark of Destruction and are below 10% health.

Lesser Evil Soul Shards

 

Stain of Sin 

• Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. When you kill 50 enemies, you spawn a pool of blood that increases the damage done to elite enemies by 150% and lasts 15 seconds.
• Additional Powers
  • The pool of blood now negates Elite affixes within its area.
  • You gain an additional Rift Progress Orb when you kill and elite pack.
  • The pool of blood now collects Rift Progress Orbs.

 

Dregs of Lies 

• Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. Your pets deal 50% 25% increased damage.
• Additional Powers
  • Killing an elite enemy reduces all your active cooldowns by 5 seconds.
  • On receiving fatal damage, spawn a shadow that prevents your death, restores your health to 35%, and grants +225 All Resist to all party members while it is active. The shadow only lasts 15 seconds.
  • Each time your pet hits an enemy, your damage is increased by 1% 0.5% for 5 seconds. This stacks up to 100 times. When you reach 100 stacks, the stacks quickly reset to 0.

 

Remnant of Pain 

• Base Power: Your Critical Hit Chance is reduced by 15%. Attacks against Incapacitated enemies are automatically critical hits.
• Additional Powers
  • Hitting enemies with cold damage has a 50% chance to freeze them. Cold skill damage is increased to frozen targets by 20%.
  • Gain passability while your movement speed bonus is over 50%. When you move through enemies you knock them back and stun them for 2 seconds.
  • When you critically hit an enemy you increase the attack speed all players by 5% for 5 seconds. Max 10 stacks.

 

Essence of Anguish 

• Base Power: Every time you deal poison damage to an enemy you increase your cooldown reduction and movement speed by 2.5% while your damage received is increased by 5% for 10 seconds. Max 10 stacks.
• Additional Powers
  • Your movement speed and cooldown reduction can be increased up to 15 times by dealing poison damage to an enemy.
  • When you deal poison damage to an enemy they receive 50% increased poison damage from all sources for 10 seconds.
  • Killing an enemy deals the damage done by the death blow to all enemies within 25 yards.

 

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Items

General

• Depth Diggers: Primary skills deal 80-100% additional damage.

Barbarian

• Remorseless: While both Wrath of the Berserker and Call of the Ancients are active, Hammer of the Ancients deals 600-800% increased damage.

Witch Doctor 

• Shukrani's Triumph: After the initial duration of Spirit walk ends, it will continue to last until you attack 3 times or until an elite enemy is within 20 yards of you. Attacks while in the spirit realm deal 75-100% increased damage.
• Lakumba's Ornament: Reduce all damage taken by 60% if your Soul Harvest stack is at least (1-3), and an additional 2% for each stack of Soul Harvest.
• Spider Queen's Grasp​: Corpse Spiders deals an additional 600-800% damage and releases a web on impact that Slows enemies by 80%.
• Brood of Araneae​: Corpse Spiders deals an additional 75-100% damage, and each spider bite causes the target to take an additional 1% damage from Corpse Spiders for 5 seconds.
• Spirit of Arachyr (2-piece bonus): Summon a permanent Spider Queen connected to you by an infested thread. Enemies caught in the thread are infested. Corpse Spider attacks against infested enemies inflict the same damage to all infested enemies. The Spider Queen is commanded to move to where you cast your Corpse Spiders. Corpse Spiders now spawns with health.
• Spirit of Arachyr (4-piece bonus): The Spider Queen now leaves behind webs that lasts for 15 seconds and Slows enemies. Infested enemies remain infested while on the web. You take 75% reduced damage while in the web and for 4 seconds after.
• Spirit of Arachyr (6-piece bonus): The damage of creature skills is increased by 17500% 25000%. Creature skills are Corpse Spiders, Plague of Toads, Firebats, Locust Swarm, Hex, and Piranhas.

Demon Hunter

• Marauder's Encasement (4-piece bonus): Sentries cast Elemental Arrow, Chakram, Impale, Multishot, and Cluster Arrow when you do, as well as automatically cast your equipped Hatred spenders.
• Marauder's Encasement (6-piece bonus): Your primary skills, Elemental Arrow, Chakram, Impale, Multishot, Cluster Arrow, Companions, Vengeance, and Sentries deal 12000% increased damage for every active Sentry.
• The Shadow's Mantle (6-piece bonus): Impale deals an additional 75000% weapon damage to the first enemy hit, and 25000% to subsequent enemies.
• Bombardier’s Rucksack: You may have 2 additional Sentries. Cluster Arrow deals 150-200% increased damage.

Necromancer

• Bones of Rathma (6-piece bonus): Each permanent active minion increases the damage of Army of the Dead by 1750%, up to 31,500%.

Wizard

• Firebird's Finery (6-piece bonus): You gain 5000% increased damage while Ignite is applied to a target. Hitting an Ignited enemy with a non-channeling fire spell deals Ignite damage multiplied by Combustion stacks. Pets cannot trigger this effect

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Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that prevented pets cast by the player from proccing Oculus Ring if it is equipped on a Follower.
• Fixed a bug that caused Momentum stacks to not always apply properly when using Calamity and The Ninth Cirri Satchel.
• Fixed a bug where Life per Second granted from Mantra of Healing isn't being applied to the shield generated by Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard.
• Fixed a bug where Mystic Ally: Earth Ally damage was not increased by The Crudest Boots.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Mystic Ally: Fire Ally active from attacking the Rift Guardian Perendi.

Diablo II: Resurrected | 12.6 - PC & Console Patch Notes - 2.3.0.1

A new patch for PC & Console is now available in Diablo II: Resurrected!

Originally Posted by PezRadar (Official Post)

 

PATCH NOTES

A new patch is now available for Windows® PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation®5, and PlayStation®4. We will update this thread once it is available for Nintendo Switch™ system.

 

To share your feedback, please post in the Diablo II: Resurrected forum 2.

To report a PC bug, visit our Bug Report forum 1.

To report a Console bug, visit our Bug Report forum 1.

For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum 1.

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BUG FIXES

Consoles

• Fixed an issue that required players to have a premium account to access offline player difficulty scaling.
• Fixed an issue that caused Assassin traps and Sorceress Hydras to teleport to the player after they move a certain distance from where the skill was cast.

Windows PC

• Fixed an issue that caused Assassin traps and Sorceress Hydras to teleport to the player after they move a certain distance from where the skill was cast.
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to bind mouse wheel inputs to skills.

Season 25 | The Lords of Hell | Preview Blog

Season 25 in Diablo III will begin on December 10th at 5:00pm (PST/CET/KST)!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

Update on 12/3: Content in red represents changes recently made from PTR 2.7.2.

 

Season 25 will begin on December 10, at 5PM (PST/CET/KST) shortly after our next Diablo III update. Read on to learn more about the season theme and balance changes coming in Patch 2.7.2. We are expecting this update to be released on December 7.

 

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Table of Contents

• Season Theme
• Season Cosmetic Rewards
• Season Journey Rewards
• Season Conquests
• Haedrig's Gifts
• Patch Notes
  • Seasons
  • Items
  • Bug Fixes

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New Season Theme

Though the Black Soulstone has been destroyed, lingering fragments of The Lords of Hell once contained therein still persist in Sanctuary. These Soul Shards hold immense power—power that once belonged to the Prime and Lesser Evils. Cunning Nephalem who find and wield these Soul Stones must exercise caution. Power can be alluring, and the road to the Burning Hells is paved with good intentions...

 

With the upcoming 25th Anniversary of the Diablo Franchise, we wanted players to delve into the darker side of the Nephalem's past. In Season 25, players can embrace evil by infusing themselves with the essences of The Lords of Hell. Players will embark on their Season Journey to discover and upgrade demonic Soul Shards based on the seven Lords of Hell. By embodying a Prime and Lesser Evil, players will inflict new forms of pain and suffering on the demons of Sanctuary. We can't wait for players to get their hands on Soul Shards to start unlocking their true power.

 

 

 

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Seasonal Cosmetic Rewards

Beginning with Season 17, we began reintroducing previous rewards to make them available to players who may have missed them the first time around. For Season 25, this means awards originally available from Season 13 are returning. In addition to the Helm and Shoulders slots of the exclusive Conqueror Set, portraits themed around Imperius will be available. Those who enjoy collecting pets will also be pleased to see the return of—Blaine’s Bear! While traveling together, you may be tempted to ask him why he’s covered in blood, or try removing the sharp objects he carries around. We strongly advise against this.

 

 

However, we know it’s nice to have something new to aim for if you’ve participated in previous Seasons. We’re continuing to provide new End of Journey rewards as introduced in Season 17, with two new cosmetic ones for those who complete the entirety of the Season journey. Survive The Lords of Hell and complete the Season 25 Guardian Journey to earn the Pane of Tristram Portrait and The Dark Lordling Pet.

 

 

 

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Season Journey Rewards

If you’ve been playing the past few Seasons diligently and reached Conqueror in the Season Journey each time, you’ve accrued a few extra stash tabs. Players who have not yet earned a total of five stash tabs via the Season Journey can still unlock an additional one by completing the following tasks at the Conqueror tier:

• Complete a Torment XIII Rift in under 5 minutes
• Complete Greater Rift 60 solo
• Kill Greed on Torment XIII
• Kill Cydaea on Torment XIII in under 15 seconds
• Reforge a Legendary or Set item
• Augment an Ancient item with a Level 50 or greater Legendary Gem
• Level three Legendary Gems to 55
• Complete two Conquests

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Seasonal Conquests

Speaking of Conquests, we’re rotating those, too! Love going fast? Sprinter and Speed Racer will be making a return. Enjoy testing your mettle in Greater Rifts? Divinity and Lionhearted are also coming back. If you’d rather max out your kill count with Cursed Chests, Curses! and Stars Align will be right up your alley. Those who enjoy seeing how far they can go without Set Items will get a kick out of The Thrill and Super Human. Finally, if you’re keen to show off your mastery of Set Dungeons, Masters of the Universe and Masters of Sets will be available once more.

 

 

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Haedrig’s Gift

Finally, just as before, you’ll get a shiny new Class Set courtesy of Haedrig’s Gift for completing certain chapters in the Season Journey. We’ve listed the available Sets below. For those new to Seasons, here’s how it works:

 

Completing Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the Season Journey will reward you with three Haedrig’s Gifts. Each Gift contains a few pieces from one of your Class Sets. Players can only unlock one Class Set in this manner per Season across Hardcore and Non-Hardcore, so choose wisely!

 

The set you will receive depends on the Class of the character you’re playing when you open each Haedrig’s Gift. To collect a full Class Set, you’ll need to open all three on the same character.

Here are the sets granted by Haedrig’s Gift in Season 25:

• Barbarian – Might of the Earth
• Crusader – Thorns of the Invoker
• Demon Hunter – The Shadow’s Mantle
• Monk – Monkey King’s Garb
• Necromancer – Grace of Inarius
• Witch Doctor – Raiment of the Jade Harvester
• Wizard – Firebird’s Finery

 

 

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Patch Notes

Below you will find the patch notes for the upcoming update for Diablo III, Patch 2.7.2

 

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PATCH 2.7.2

Table of Contents:

• Seasons
• Items
• Bug Fixes and Misc Updates

Note: All changes apply to all versions of Diablo III, including PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC unless otherwise indicated.

---

 

Seasons

Season 25 introduces a new type of socketable item called Soul Shards. Nephalem can find 7 unique Soul Shards, based on the Lords of Hell, which give players demonic new powers. One of 3 Prime Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Helms and one of 4 Lesser Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Weapons. Each Soul Shard can be upgraded three times using a new seasonal-exclusive consumable, the Hellforge Ember.

 

Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers can drop from anywhere in Sanctuary, but Soul Shards have a higher chance to drop from Bosses. Soul Shards cannot be traded, but can be salvaged or utilized in Caldesann’s Despair. You may only equip one Prime Evil Soul Shard and one Lesser Evil Soul Shard at a time. Lastly, Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers only drop in Seasonal play, and will not transfer to your non-seasonal character when the season ends. For a look into the capabilities for each of the Soul Shard powers look below:

 

Prime Evil Soul Shards

 

Sliver of Terror 

• Base Power: Your cooldowns are increased by 25%. For every skill on cooldown, you take 12.5% reduced damage and deal 25% 12.5% increased damage.
• Additional Powers:
  • Your attack speed and critical hit chance are increased by 7% 5% for each skill on cooldown.
  • You cast a devastating Ring of Fire after killing 100 enemies.
  • If three or more skills are on cooldown, your lightning and fire skill damage are increased by 50%.

Shard of Hatred 

• Base Power: You deal 15% reduced damage while you have 3 or fewer enemies within 25 yards. If more than 3 enemies are within the same distance, you deal 10% 5% increased damage per enemy (to a maximum of 100% 50%).
• Additional Powers
  • Killing an elite enemy pulls all enemies within 40 yards to where the elite died.
  • Your Movement speed is increased by 50%. Each enemy within 25 yards reduces your movement speed by 10% up to 70%.
  • You now deal 15% 10% increased damage for every enemy instead of 10% 5% (to a maximum of 150% 100%)

Fragment of Destruction 

• Base Power: You move unhindered through enemies. Each enemy you pass through receives Mark of Destruction for 7 seconds. Each marked enemy that dies removes 1 second from one of your skills on cooldown. If the Mark of Destruction expires before the enemies die you lose 2% of your maximum health as damage. Marks are not applied if you are below 35% health.
• Additional Powers
  • You have a 25% Chance to restore 5% health when an enemy dies with Mark of Destruction active.
  • When you apply Mark of Destruction to an enemy, you increase your movement speed by 5% for 7 seconds. Max 10 Stacks.
  • You now leave a trail of fire in your wake that slays enemies with the Mark of Destruction and are below 10% health.

Lesser Evil Soul Shards

 

Stain of Sin 

• Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. When you kill 50 enemies, you spawn a pool of blood that increases the damage done to elite enemies by 150% and lasts 15 seconds.
• Additional Powers
  • The pool of blood now negates Elite affixes within its area.
  • You gain an additional Rift Progress Orb when you kill and elite pack.
  • The pool of blood now collects Rift Progress Orbs.

 

Dregs of Lies 

• Base Power: You deal 25% less damage. Your pets deal 50% 25% increased damage.
• Additional Powers
  • Killing an elite enemy reduces all your active cooldowns by 5 seconds.
  • On receiving fatal damage, spawn a shadow that prevents your death, restores your health to 35%, and grants +225 All Resist to all party members while it is active. The shadow only lasts 15 seconds.
  • Each time your pet hits an enemy, your damage is increased by 1% 0.5% for 5 seconds. This stacks up to 100 times. When you reach 100 stacks, the stacks quickly reset to 0.

 

Remnant of Pain 

• Base Power: Your Critical Hit Chance is reduced by 15%. Attacks against Incapacitated enemies are automatically critical hits.
• Additional Powers
  • Hitting enemies with cold damage has a 50% chance to freeze them. Cold skill damage is increased to frozen targets by 20%.
  • Gain passability while your movement speed bonus is over 50%. When you move through enemies you knock them back and stun them for 2 seconds.
  • When you critically hit an enemy you increase the attack speed all players by 5% for 5 seconds. Max 10 stacks.

 

Essence of Anguish 

• Base Power: Every time you deal poison damage to an enemy you increase your cooldown reduction and movement speed by 2.5% while your damage received is increased by 5% for 10 seconds. Max 10 stacks.
• Additional Powers
  • Your movement speed and cooldown reduction can be increased up to 15 times by dealing poison damage to an enemy.
  • When you deal poison damage to an enemy they receive 50% increased poison damage from all sources for 10 seconds.
  • Killing an enemy deals the damage done by the death blow to all enemies within 25 yards.

 

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Items

General

• Depth Diggers: Primary skills deal 80-100% additional damage.

Barbarian

• Remorseless: While both Wrath of the Berserker and Call of the Ancients are active, Hammer of the Ancients deals 600-800% increased damage.

Witch Doctor 

• Shukrani's Triumph: After the initial duration of Spirit walk ends, it will continue to last until you attack 3 times or until an elite enemy is within 20 yards of you. Attacks while in the spirit realm deal 75-100% increased damage.
• Lakumba's Ornament: Reduce all damage taken by 60% if your Soul Harvest stack is at least (1-3), and an additional 2% for each stack of Soul Harvest.
• Spider Queen's Grasp​: Corpse Spiders deals an additional 600-800% damage and releases a web on impact that Slows enemies by 80%.
• Brood of Araneae​: Corpse Spiders deals an additional 75-100% damage, and each spider bite causes the target to take an additional 1% damage from Corpse Spiders for 5 seconds.
• Spirit of Arachyr (2-piece bonus): Summon a permanent Spider Queen connected to you by an infested thread. Enemies caught in the thread are infested. Corpse Spider attacks against infested enemies inflict the same damage to all infested enemies. The Spider Queen is commanded to move to where you cast your Corpse Spiders. Corpse Spiders now spawns with health.
• Spirit of Arachyr (4-piece bonus): The Spider Queen now leaves behind webs that lasts for 15 seconds and Slows enemies. Infested enemies remain infested while on the web. You take 75% reduced damage while in the web and for 4 seconds after.
• Spirit of Arachyr (6-piece bonus): The damage of creature skills is increased by 17500% 25000%. Creature skills are Corpse Spiders, Plague of Toads, Firebats, Locust Swarm, Hex, and Piranhas.

Demon Hunter

• Marauder's Encasement (4-piece bonus): Sentries cast Elemental Arrow, Chakram, Impale, Multishot, and Cluster Arrow when you do, as well as automatically cast your equipped Hatred spenders.
• Marauder's Encasement (6-piece bonus): Your primary skills, Elemental Arrow, Chakram, Impale, Multishot, Cluster Arrow, Companions, Vengeance, and Sentries deal 12000% increased damage for every active Sentry.
• The Shadow's Mantle (6-piece bonus): Impale deals an additional 75000% weapon damage to the first enemy hit, and 25000% to subsequent enemies.
• Bombardier’s Rucksack: You may have 2 additional Sentries. Cluster Arrow deals 150-200% increased damage.

Necromancer

• Bones of Rathma (6-piece bonus): Each permanent active minion increases the damage of Army of the Dead by 1750%, up to 31,500%.

Wizard

• Firebird's Finery (6-piece bonus): You gain 5000% increased damage while Ignite is applied to a target. Hitting an Ignited enemy with a non-channeling fire spell deals Ignite damage multiplied by Combustion stacks. Pets cannot trigger this effect

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Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that prevented pets cast by the player from proccing Oculus Ring if it is equipped on a Follower.
• Fixed a bug that caused Momentum stacks to not always apply properly when using Calamity and The Ninth Cirri Satchel.
• Fixed a bug where Life per Second granted from Mantra of Healing isn't being applied to the shield generated by Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard.
• Fixed a bug where Mystic Ally: Earth Ally damage was not increased by The Crudest Boots.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Mystic Ally: Fire Ally active from attacking the Rift Guardian Perendi.

Diablo II: Resurrected | 12.2 - PC Patch Notes - 2.3 / Build 67314

Patch 2.3 for Diablo II: Resurrected is now live on PC!

Originally Posted by Hooley (Official Post)

PATCH NOTES

A new patch will be available this morning for Windows® PC.

To share your feedback, please post in the Diablo II: Resurrected forum.

To report a PC bug, visit our Bug Report forum.

For troubleshooting assistance, visit our Technical Support forum.

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GAMEPLAY

• Players now have a “Game Difficulty Scale” available in the options menu for offline games, which provides the same function as the /players debug command

• Players can now enable “Force Move,” an option available in the control settings which can allow the player to command their character to move to a specific location without targeting monsters

• Players can now enable “Quick Cast,” an option available in game settings which can allow the player to use abilities with hotkeys without having to select the skill in the UI

• Players can now enable the “Active Skill Bindings” bar. This additional bar shown above the standard HUD represents the skills (up to 16) players have mapped for their character.

ACCESSIBILITY & GRAPHICAL IMPROVEMENTS

GAMEPLAY

• A visual indicator has been added to show when a character’s attack misses an opponent in PvP (please reference the options menu to enable “Miss Text”)

• Pets, Summons, and Mercenaries will now warp to a player’s location if they are far away from the player’s character

• Pathing has been improved for player summons

CHAT & SOCIAL

• Players can now use the TAB key to cycle through all channels in-game and in lobby

• The text color for Whispers now shows as a different color than system messages

• Battle.net Real ID friends now show the Real ID names on your friends list in-game

LOBBY MENU

• A visual indicator has been added to represent PC lobby characters who are muted or ignored players

• A visual indicator has been added to show character level and expansion type to PC lobby characters

GRAPHICS

• NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is now supported. To enable, please reference your options menu.

MISCELLANEOUS

• Added proper error messaging in cases where the game couldn’t retrieve online characters from the server

• Deleting your character will no longer jump your character selector to the top of the list, instead, your character selector will progress to the next sequential character

BUG FIXES

ART | ENEMIES

• Fixed an issue where NPC Talic, Korlic, and Madawc’s VFX may not always play

• Fixed an issue that caused Hell Swarm enemies to appear as white when they spawned for a short amount of time before changing to their correct color

• Fixed an issue preventing the Abyss Knight from receiving full color tinting on frozen or poison effects

• Fixed an issue preventing the Imp monster deaths from being correctly tinted to match the monster’s color variant

• Fixed an issue preventing the Amazon’s Valkyrie skill from showing as the correct color

• Fixed an issue preventing part of the Willowisps from receiving the correct color tinting

ART | WORLD

• Fixed an issue where the exploding cow could reappear unexploded

• Fixed issues where in certain areas, players could partially fall into the floor or float above the ground

• Fixed issues where secret objects were incorrectly highlighting

• Fixed issues where some assets could disappear incorrectly while on-screen

• Fixed issues where some assets on lower detail levels had distorted geometry

• Adjusted red light intensity in Throne of Destruction

• Fixed various texture issues and graphical bugs

ART | PLAYERS

• Fixed an issue affecting the Necromancer where the Dim Vision VFX could stretch when teleporting

• Fixed an issue where animation stutters could occur when continually casting Inferno or Arctic Blast

• Fixed an issue affecting the Assassin’s Phoenix Strike VFX which could remain on screen for other players after the charges had been used

• Fixed an issue affecting the Necromancers Fire Golem death VFX appearing offset from the corpse

• Fixed an issue with Wolf and Dire Wolf summoning VFX causing poly-storming

AUDIO

• Fixed an issue preventing audio from properly playing in the Options menu when using a controller

• Fixed an issue preventing the audio of auto-filling the belt from playing when pressing R3 on a controller

• Fixed an issue causing an infinite looping of voice lines when Diablo spawned in a game with a Classic character

• Fixed an issue causing music to start over while toggling in and out of the Legacy Mode

• Fixed an issue in Act 3 where some quest items would not play audio when picking them up

CRASH & STUCK FIXES

• Fixed a crash that could occur if the Act 2 Mercenary uses Jab while transformed with the Delirium Rune Word

• Fixed a crash that could occur if you max out your channel name length and select that channel in the dropdown menu

• Fixed a rare issue where a player could become stuck in the Join Game state after failing to create an Online game

• Miscellaneous Crash Fixes

GAMEPLAY

Online

• Fixed an issue in multiplayer sessions where if one player smashed another player’s Soulstone on the Hellforge, that player would be unable to interact with their inventory

• Fixed an issue in online games where waypoints could become unselectable when surrounded by monsters

• Fixed an issue in online games with Korlic’s Leap Attack

• Fixed an issue where entering a Town Portal of another player could cause you to load into the next area, before teleporting your character back into town

• Fixed an issue with client to server synchronization when using Holy Shield

• Fixed an issue where when attempting to trade a player who was either in their stash or hovering their cursor over an item would flash the trade prompt

• Improved synchronization of ability and attack animations in online games

• Fixed an issue where your trade with another player could close if another player joins the game session

• Fixed an issue where other players’ corpses wouldn’t appear until they chose to respawn

• Fixed an issue where player attack and skills would not always stay in sync between client and server

Player Abilities

• Fixed an issue where going hostile with a Druid character could show their summons at 1/3 of their actual health

• Fixed an issue where using Telekinesis on the Altar of Ancients wouldn’t activate the Ancients

• Fixed an issue where way pointing in Legacy mode while the Hurricane skill is active could cause a long loading screen

• Fixed an issue with the Assassin’s Dragon Talon skill animation playing an extra kick

• Fixed an issue where the Druid’s Fury skill was not properly animating as many hits as it throws when using the Werewolf and Werebear form

• Telekinesis no longer requires line of sight to interact with a target

• The Throw skill can now be equipped even if you aren’t holding a throwable weapon

• Fixed an issue where overlapping Fire Wall or Blaze missiles could cause increased damage

• Fixed an issue where a player would use Telekinesis on the Orifice in Act 2 that would cause an interface screen to become stuck on screen

• Fixed an issue where if you are in town and cast Enchant on another player it could initiate a trade

• Fixed an issue where Paladin characters couldn’t interact with their stash if they had certain abilities mapped to specific controller buttons

• Fixed an issue where auras could toggle off and on briefly while performing inventory functions

• Fixed an issue where the Paladin could begin rubber banding when his mana was depleted while holding down the Charge skill

• Fixed an issue where you couldn’t equip Conviction if you were using a bow or crossbow

• Fixed an issue where Shadow Master would not teleport when using the Dragon Flight ability

• Fixed an issue where on occasion, monsters revived by the Necromancer couldn’t be unsummoned

Controller

• /nopickup now works properly for controllers on PC

• Fixed an issue on controller where binding an oskill to a button and then binding a common skill would cause the incorrect tooltip to display

• Fixed an issue where other party members death could cause vibration on other players’ controllers

• Fixed an issue where quick moving items between stash and inventory could fail

• Fixed an issue where the toggle “run” UI would display the wrong button if Swap Sticks option was enabled

• Fixed an issue where if you accept a trade and then loot your corpse before the other player accepts, the trade would look like it was successful but was not

• Fixed an issue where navigation past either end of the channel list would cause the user to be unable to navigate the channels again

• Fixed an issue where players could not use UI buttons or pick up items when imbuing

• Fixed an issue where using “R3” to autofill your belt would occasionally fail part way through

• Fixed an issue where typing a message in game chat while on the quest panel would remove the quest UI

• Fixed an issue where a key bind for run/walk toggle would interfere with Paladin auras

• Fixed an issue where having a trade initiated while in the skill bind menu would cause players to lose controller capability

• Fixed an issue where if the emote wheel was on-screen and a trade was initiated, the emote wheel interface screen would overlap the trade interface screen

Mercenaries

• Dead Mercenaries will no longer appear in town

• Fixed an issue where a player with a dead mercenary joining another player’s game could cause the dead mercenary to appear in an idle animation

• Fixed an issue where an Act 2 Mercenary could display the incorrect Aura

• Fixed an issue where Mercenaries would not always teleport with the player

Enemies

• Fixed an issue where stunned Grotesques were not targetable

• Fixed an issue where Tomb Vipers’ Poison Cloud attack was improperly dealing physical damage.; the poison clouds now deal proper poison damage

• Fixed an issue where some of Baal’s projectiles and attacks could display different VFX for different players in the session

• Fixed an issue where Death Lords’ frenzy attacks wouldn’t animate correctly

World

• Fixed an issue where hatched cocoons could reset and become unhatched

Stash

• Fixed an issue where if you attempted to deposit more gold into your stash than the stash could fit, no gold would be deposited at all

PERFORMANCE

ABILITIES

• Optimized various player abilities

ENEMIES

• Optimized various boss encounters and monsters

LOCALIZATION

• Corrected audio translation on Greiz’s voice over for “Who goes there?” when playing in Chinese

• Corrected audio translation on Kashya’s voice over for Act 1, Quest 5 when playing in Chinese

• Corrected issues where some text in some languages could align improperly with the UI bounds

• Removed the gender prefixes for the speaker’s name in non-English translations

• Fixed an issue where in certain languages the voice lines were not translated in chat after defeating Baal for the first time

USER INTERFACE

GENERAL

• Fixed an issue where the player hostility tooltip would be difficult to click to display in Online mode

CONTROLLER

• Fixed an issue where a red screen flash would appear when unequipping items that give life bonus or dropping specific items

• Fixed an issue where the skill icon for Town Portals on controllers wouldn’t turn red when it should

• Fixed an issue where a player’s cursor could get stuck on the potion belt if they had a sash equipped and used the directional pad while hovering over belt slots

• Fixed an issue on controller where the join game button in the Lobby would unselect and go back to the lobby list if another person joins the game

• Fixed an issue where the player could not navigate to buttons below the game creation options panel when using a controller

• Fixed an issue where Baal’s health bar while using a controller would be improperly sized

MERCENARIES

• Fixed an issue where Mercenary skills would be displayed in the incorrect order when using a controller

CHAT

• Fixed an issue where if the chat channel list was large enough to create a scroll bar, and then channels are left, the player could have difficulty scrolling back to top of the channel list

• Fixed an issue on where longer chat messages could be getting cut off by the chat window

• Fixed an issue when clicking on a linked item, the game could incorrectly display the previously clicked linked item

• Fixed an issue with the Chat window on blocking the player from casting

• Using the /whois chat command without a username will no longer cause the game response to display twice

LOBBY

• Fixed issues where certain button highlights would be misaligned

• Fixed an issue where clicking and dragging to highlight text didn’t display until the player let go of the mouse

• Addressed inconsistencies with text highlight behavior

AUTOMAP

• Fixed an issue with the automap not showing explored areas when entering a new area from a portal until the player moves around

• Fixed an issue where level exits wouldn’t always load on the Minimap when rapidly teleporting

INVENTORY

• Fixed an issue where the button highlight is improperly sized on the “Imbue” and “Add Sockets” button when using a controller on PC

FRONT END

• Fixed an issue where indestructible items weren’t visible on your character in the menus

• Added error messaging for when a player attempts to create a channel with a name longer than 15 characters

• Fixed an issue in the credits where music could stop playing

• Fixed an issue where holding the “Escape” button caused the exit screen to keep popping up repeatedly

• Fixed an issue where the players lobby character would be cut off if the player had an equipped helmet that was too tall

• Fixed an issue where newly created characters were not selected or sorted properly upon returning to the front-end

• Weapons, armor, and shields with no durability remaining will no longer appear on your character in the front end

SETTINGS

• Fixed issues where certain button highlights would be misaligned

• Fixed an issue where the player could lose controller input when switching between Controller and Keyboard & Mouse on the HDR calibration screen

PANELS & HUD

• Fixed issues where certain button highlights would be misaligned

• Fixed an issue where the Necromancer class text in the Party Menu would get cut off in Large Font Mode

• Fixed an issue when swapping in and out of Legacy mode that was causing certain tooltips to shrink

• Using a traversal skill while the waypoint menu is active will now correctly dismiss the waypoint menu

Dawn of Damnation - New In Game Event For Diablo: Immortal

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

 

Only dread follows the trail of Skarn, Herald of Terror, on his path to cleanse the world of Sanctuary.  Unchecked. Unchallenged. Skarn’s forces have ascended from the Burning Hells wreaking havoc across the Western Kingdom. Westmarch is the only bastion that halts the unrelenting wake of destruction. Who will confront the minions of the Lord of Damnation? Who will resist this evil insurgency? 

 

Heroes of Sanctuary, war is upon you! Beckon your allies, sharpen your blades, and hone your skills. Greatness and spoils await those who vanquish these foes in the Dawn of Damnation! 

PLEASE NOTE: Diablo Immortal is still in-development. Game content in the Closed Beta is not final and subject to change.

 

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DAWN OF DAMNATION

The Dawn of Damnation in-game event is here. Closed Beta test participants will have the chance to challenge Skarn’s terrifying forces. Rally your friends or stand-alone against the invasion. The fight for Sanctuary has begun. For two weeks, battle will wage between you and Skarn’s host of war!  

 

Muster your prowess and prepare—to eliminate these enemies is no easy feat. Eligible players must be at least level 30 (completing Codex Activities is a great way to level from 20 to 29). 

 

Heroes who meet these criteria will be prompted to accept a quest in the City of Westmarch that kicks off this event. After assisting Westmarch’s finest in expelling the demonic horde, these players will be able to progress over the next couple of weeks through a series of Daily missions (up to 42 missions per week) and event stages.  

 

 

Enticing rewards and treasures will be plenty for those who succeed in liberating Sanctuary. Completing missions can earn you Obols of the damned that can be redeemed to acquire treasures including Legendary Crests and Gems in the Event Shop. Additionally, all heroes can reap additional Obols of the damned when certain server-wide milestones are reached.  

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THE QUEST CONTINUES

May fortune favor you in your quest for riches and glory. As the Closed Beta continues, we welcome you to share your impressions and feedback on the r/DiabloImmortal subreddit or across other community channels. As we progress through the Closed Beta, we’ll be listening to your feedback as we aim to craft an awesome Diablo experience. 

 

If you want to learn more about Diablo Immortal, check out our website here, or for real-time updates, follow our official Twitter @DiabloImmortal! 

 

Heroes of Sanctuary, thank you—and have fun raising some Hell this Holiday season! 

Season 24 | Ethereal Memory - End Dates

Originally Posted by FilthieRich (Official Post)

Hello all -

Season 24 is coming to a close. Below are the times on when Season 24 will end for each region.

North America - December 5 at 5pm PDT
Europe - December 5at 5pm CEST
Asia - December 5 at 5pm KST

We will be providing a Season 25 preview soon which will include the start time for the next season. Stay Tuned!

Diablo II: Resurrected Patch 2.3 Highlights | Coming Soon

A new patch is incoming for Diablo II: Resurrected, adding quality of life, accessibility, and graphical improvements. In addition, there will be the first ever Diablo II: Resurrected PTR launching in the coming weeks!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

 

For the past two months, brave adventurers have clashed with fearsome foes from the realms of Sanctuary to the Burning Hells, slaying and looting their way to victory.

 

In this time, we’ve seen significant improvement in decreasing queue times as players now on average wait less than 60 seconds to enter Sanctuary and get in-game. As our team continues to work and make further optimizations to our game servers, we’ve also been listening closely to our community and absorbing feedback from our players. We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a couple of new features our team has been working on to level up the player experience in Diablo II: Resurrected. These features will officially be introduced in early December when Patch 2.3 goes live. This update will also be accompanied by many bug fixes and other improvements, which will be detailed upon release of the patch.

PLEASE NOTE: Game content discussed in this blog is not final and subject to change.

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When we set out to resurrect this beloved classic, we made great efforts to modernize the art and visuals of the original Diablo II experience, while also making the gameplay more accessible. We hope these changes will resonate with you as we continue to pursue those core development goals.

OFFLINE DIFFICULTY SCALING (“/PLAYERS 8”)

This feature from the original PC game is now coming to console platforms. For solo offline players who want to scale the game difficulty—as well as the rewards—up to eight players, your wish is being granted. To use this feature, players simply need to open their settings menu, go to the “Game Settings” tab, then “Offline,” and adjust the “Offline Difficulty Scaling” slider. Once that setting has been configured, new monsters will spawn with varying HP and reward players with vastly increased experience gains and loot drop rates when defeated.

 

In the offline single-player experience, the default player setting is “1,” so you will be able to scale the difficulty anywhere between the range of 1–8. For example, if you wanted to scale the difficulty of monsters in your offline session to the equivalent to having four players present, you would adjust the slider to “4”. As in Diablo II Classic, you’ll have to start a new game session to set your preferred difficulty with the slider.

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KEYBOARD AND MOUSE QUICK CAST & ACTIVE SKILL BINDINGS OPTIONS

Currently, players use spells and abilities with a keyboard and mouse by clicking the right and left mouse buttons. This means that players only have access to two abilities at any given time. Most advanced players use the function keys (F1¬–F12) to re-map the right and left mouse buttons if they want to swap their abilities on the fly. This means that if you want to use an ability that isn’t currently mapped to one of your mouse buttons, you’ll need to hit the function key that you have mapped to a different skill, and then click the mouse button to use it.

 

When we brought controller support to Diablo II: Resurrected, players gained immediate access to up to 12 buttons. When a player presses any of the face buttons or triggers that they have mapped to an ability, they instantly use them. Diablo III uses this same method, and it has become the expectation for most controller interfaces in action role-playing games.

 

We’ve seen an outpouring of community feedback requesting this feature for keyboard and mouse play, too. We originally avoided this approach because we feared it would stray too far from the original experience, but the community is eager for it, so we’re eager to deliver.

 

Players can now opt to use the Active Skill Bindings bar. This will show an additional bar above the standard HUD at the bottom of the screen. Players can map up to 16 skills (although the tooltip suggests F1–F8) to that additional bar. Furthermore, if the Quick Cast Skills option is active, pressing these buttons will instantly use the abilities rather than just re-map the right or left mouse buttons.

 

Ultimately, we leave these new feature customizations to the players’ preference. Players will be empowered to enable the “Quick Cast Skills” option to action bound skills to their current mouse’s location, as well as enable “Display Active Skill Bindings” to display the currently bound skills bar on their screen HUD. At the player’s discretion, now they can tailor their experience to the way they play.

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ACCESSIBILITY & GRAPHICAL IMPROVEMENTS

UI Visual Improvements

A handful of visual tweaks have been made to improve the front-end user interface. An indicator has been added to exemplify what players are muted or ignored.

 

Additionally, the character’s level and expansion type will now be revealed on the lobby screen. We’ve also made improvements to changing the target channel when sending a chat message, so it’s clearer and more straightforward. Lastly, players will now be able to see the real ID names of Battle.net real ID friends on their friends list.

Gameplay Improvements

On the gameplay front, we added the “miss” text indicator to Player vs. Player combat. So, players who enable miss text in their options will now be able to see when their character’s attacks miss their opponents in PvE and PvP.

 

Throw can once again be bound to a key even if the player has nothing to throw. Additionally, a new key bind called “Force Move” has been added. When used, the player’s character will automatically navigate to the current mouse location.

Audio Improvements

Players using a controller on PC or console will now hear audio cues when navigating through potential selections on the Options menu. Beyond that, players will also be able to hear audio cues when auto-filling potions to their character’s belt.

Graphical Improvements

For players on PC with Nvidia graphic cards compatible with Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology, those players will now be able to enable DLSS in the graphics setting menu, to increase graphics quality and resolution while maintaining higher GPU performance.

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THE PTR & FUTURE UPDATES

In the coming weeks, Diablo II: Resurrected will be launching its first ever Public Test Realm (PTR)—a special realm where we can test balance, bug fixes, and other enhancements we make to the game. We invite all of you to participate, as you’ll have an opportunity to play a crucial role in testing features and evolving the experience for all players. When we get closer, we’ll share more details on how you can gain access to the PTR and trial these changes.

 

The primary focus of that PTR will be revolved around fixing database issues and stabilizing our online environment. Once we are confident these fixes are in a good place, we’ll share more details on Ladder rank play and even more new changes coming to Diablo II: Resurrected.

 

Our community continues to be instrumental in making this game better, and for that we want to say Thank You. As we continue to update and improve the game, please keep sharing your feedback with us—your collaboration is key to building an incredible Diablo II: Resurrected experience we will all treasure for years to come.

 

If you want to learn more about Diablo II: Resurrected, check out our website here, or for real-time updates, follow our official Twitter @Diablo.

Diablo 3 PTR 2.7.2 - Updated November 12th

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)

 

Update on 11/12: PTR 2.7.2 has been updated. Please see below for changes and "Developer Note" annotations in RED

 

Our two-week PTR testing period for the 2.7.2 update begins November 4 and we're asking for your help to quell the tides of surging demons. Take a look at the preliminary patch notes below and start theorycrafting how you'll make the most of the Soul Shard system and item balance changes; Patch 2.7.2 PTR will be arriving soon.

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Table of Contents

• PTR Focus Details
  • PTR Tips
• Patch Notes
  • Seasons
  • Items
• Bug Fixes
• How to Participate in PTR
• PTR Character Copy

Please note that this is a preview for PTR content, which is subject to change.

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PTR Focus & Details

We’ll be conducting the Patch 2.7.2 PTR starting Thursday, November 4. During this time there may be periodic maintenances, outages, hotfixes, or minor patches.

• There will be three PTR-unique buffs active to help you on your journey: increased Legendary drop rate, increased experience gains, and double Blood Shard drops. You can also buy new gear for testing from the special PTR vendor, Djank Mi'em, who will exchange Blood Shards for class-specific bags full of Legendary items that we'd love for you to test!
• Class and Balance Changes: To ensure that the most significant class changes receive an ample amount of attention, we'd love for you to focus testing and feedback on the set changes to the Witch Doctor, Barbarian, Necromancer, Wizard and Demon Hunter.
• New Season Theme Testing: We're looking to gather feedback on the seasonal theme content featuring Soul Shards.

So that we can efficiently review your posts, feedback should be provided in the PTR Feedback forum while bug reports should be provided in the PTR Bug Report forum.

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PTR Testing Tips

As with our previous PTRs, this testing period is short, so it's best to hit the ground running. Whether you’re a PTR veteran or newcomer, we thought we’d pass along a few tips to get you started.

• Because of the limited duration of this PTR, we ask that participants pick a particular portion of this update to focus on testing.
  • For example, if you’re primarily a Wizard player, consider what changes impact the Wizard specifically. What you like best, what you think may still need adjustment, and what you’d want to see in the future (even if that may be beyond the scope of this patch) are all good questions to ask yourself.
• Try to break things! Just tell us when you do so we can make sure that the patch launch is as smooth as possible.
• When providing feedback, focus less on a solution and more on your experience. How did the changes make you feel? Was there something “off” that you noticed? Did something seem wrong or insufficient? Suggestions are always welcome but identifying the issues themselves is most important.

---

Patch Notes

Below you will find the patch notes for the upcoming update for Diablo III, Patch 2.7.2.

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PATCH 2.7.2

Table of Contents:

• Seasons
• Items
• Bug Fixes

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Seasons

New Season Theme: Season 25 introduces a new type of socketable item called Soul Shards. Nephalem can find 7 unique Soul Shards, based on the Lords of Hell, which give players demonic new powers. One of 3 Prime Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Helms and one of 4 Lesser Evil Soul Shards can be equipped into Weapons. Each Soul Shard can be upgraded three times using a new seasonal-exclusive consumable, the Hellforge Ember.

Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers can drop from anywhere in Sanctuary, but Soul Shards have a higher chance to drop from Bosses. Soul Shards cannot be traded, but can be salvaged or utilized in Caldesann’s Despair. You may only equip one Prime Evil Soul Shard and one Lesser Evil Soul Shard at a time. Lastly, Soul Shards and Hellforge Embers only drop in Seasonal play, and will not transfer to your non-seasonal character when the season ends.

Developer's Note: With the upcoming 25th Anniversary of the Diablo Franchise, we wanted players to delve into the darker side of the Nephalem's past. In Season 25, players can embrace evil by infusing themselves with the essences of the Lords of Hell. Players will embark on their Season Journey to discover and upgrade demonic Soul Shards based on the seven Lords of Hell. By embodying a Prime and Lesser Evil, players will inflict new forms of pain and suffering on the demons of Sanctuary. We can't wait for players to get their hands on Soul Shards to start unlocking their true power.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where Rank 2 Soul Shard affixes values could sometimes change after being socketed.
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to equip 2 Lesser Soul Shards.
• Updated the possible range of All Resistance on Rank 2 upgrades to 55-62.
• Updated the possible range of Armor on Rank 2 upgrades to 375-390.

Developer's Note 11/12: In addition to fixing several bugs that resulted in some Soul Shards powers being much more powerful than intended, we've redesigned and balanced several Soul Shards to give more competitive options when choosing the right Soul Shard for a wider range of builds. 

Sliver of Terror

• Updated Sliver of Terror base power: "Your cooldowns are increased by 25%. For every skill on cooldown, you take 12.5% reduced damage and deal 25% increased damage."
• Reduced the power of Sliver of Terror's Rank 3 upgrade Ring of Fire effect and increased the required kills to 100 to proc.

 

 

Fragment of Destruction

 

• Added Fragment of Destruction Rank 3 upgrade: "When you apply Mark of Destruction to an enemy, you increase your movement speed by 5% for 7 seconds. Max 10 Stacks."
• Removed Fragment of Destruction Rank 3 upgrade: "Increase the duration of the Mark of Destruction to 10 seconds."

Stain of Sin

• Updated Stain of Sin base power: "You deal 25% less damage. When you kill 50 enemies, you spawn a pool of blood that increases the damage done to elite enemies by 150% and lasts 15 seconds.
• Added Stain of Sin Rank 3 upgrade: "You gain an additional Rift Progress Orb when you kill an elite pack."
• Removed Stain of Sin Rank 3 upgrade: "The pool of blood now also freezes non-elite enemies."
• Updated Stain of Sin Rank 3 negate elite affix power to include Wormhole and Electrified.

Dregs of Lies

• Updated Dregs of Lies base power: "You deal 25% less damage. Your pets deal 50% increased damage."
• Added Dregs of Lies Rank 3 upgrade: "Each time your pet hits an enemy, your damage is increased by 1% for 5 seconds. This stacks up to 100 times. When you reach 100 stacks, the stacks quickly reset to 0."
• Added Dregs of Lies Rank 3 upgrade: "Killing an elite enemy reduces all your active cooldowns by 5 seconds."
• Removed Dregs of Lies Rank 3 upgrade: "Double the damage reduction enemies receive when you critically strike them."
• Removed Dregs of Lies Rank 3 upgrade: "Each elite enemy slain with the damage reduction effect from this soul also reduces all your active cooldowns by 5 seconds."

Remnant of Pail

• Fixed a bug with Remnant of Pain Rank 3 passability power that caused collision issues with Mystic Ally.

 

 

Essence of Anguish

• Updated Essence of Anguish base power: "Every time you deal poison damage to an enemy you increase your cooldown reduction and movement speed by 2.5% while your damage received is increased by 5% for 10 seconds. Max 10 stacks."
• Fixed a bug that caused Essence of Anguish's Rank 3 upgrade death blow effect to cause more damage than intended.
• Fixed a bug that caused Essence of Anguish's Rank 3 upgrade death blow effect to not trigger consistently.
• Updated Essence of Anguish's Rank 3 upgrade death blow effect to not synergize with Sever's Legendary Power.
• Added a buff bar icon to track stacks of Essence of Anguish's base effect.
• Updated the tooltip of Essence of Anguish's Rank 3 death blow effect to clarify that only player attacks can trigger the effect.

 

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Items

Item Changes

General

• Updated Depth Diggers Legendary Power to work with all Primary skills.

Barbarian

• Remorseless: While both Wrath of the Berserker and Call of the Ancients are active, Hammer of the Ancients deals 600-800% increased damage.

Developer's Note: We wanted to buff the Barbarian's Hammer of the Ancients playstyle without putting the power into a specific set.

Witch Doctor 

• Shukrani's Triumph: Spirit Walk lasts until you attack 3 times or until an elite enemy is within 20 yards of you. Attacks while in the spirit realm deal 75-100% increased damage.
• Lakumba's Ornament: Reduce all damage taken by 60% if your Soul Harvest stack is at least (1-3), and an additional 2% for each stack of Soul Harvest.
• Spider Queen's Grasp​: Corpse Spiders deals an additional 600-800% damage and releases a web on impact that Slows enemies by 80%.
• Brood of Araneae​: Corpse Spiders deals an additional 75-100% damage, and each spider bite causes the target to take an additional 1% damage from Corpse Spiders for 5 seconds.
• Spirit of Arachyr (2-piece bonus): Corpse Spiders now spawns with health and attacks twice as fast. 
• Spirit of Arachyr (2-piece bonus): Summon a permanent Spider Queen connected to you by an infested thread. Enemies caught in the thread are infested. Corpse Spider attacks against infested enemies inflict the same damage to all infested enemies. The Spider Queen is commanded to move to where you cast your Corpse Spiders. Corpse Spiders now spawns with health.
• Spirit of Arachyr (4-piece bonus): Summon a permanent Spider Queen who leaves behind webs that lasts for 15 seconds and Slows enemies. You take 75% reduced damage while in the web. The Spider Queen is commanded to move to where you cast your Corpse Spiders.
• Spirit of Arachyr (4-piece bonus): The Spider Queen now leaves behind webs that lasts for 15 seconds and Slows enemies. Infested enemies remain infested while on the web. You take 75% reduced damage while in the web and for 4 seconds after.

Developer's Note: We've reworked Witch Doctor's Spirit of Arachyr set, as well as several legendary Witch Doctor items. With these changes, we hope to infuse Spirit of Arachyr with more flavor and gameplay, as well as give Witch Doctors a much needed power increase.

• Corpse Spiders are no longer affected by crowd control effects.
• Updated Ring of Emptiness to benefit attacks from all non-Fetish pets.
• Updated the tooltip of Shukrani's Triumph to better reflect functionality.
• Corpse Spiders can now benefit from Pet buffs.

Developer's Note 11/12: We've added a new mechanic to the Spirit of Arachyr set which should give it a more active and thematic playstyle. Additionally, we've given Corpse Spiders the ability to benefit from several items that buff pets, which should give more power and gearing options..

Demon Hunter

• *Correction* Marauder's Encasement (4-piece bonus): Sentries deal 400% increased damage and cast Elemental Arrow, Chakram, Impale, Multishot, and Cluster Arrow when you do, as well as automatically cast your equipped Hatred spenders.
• Marauder's Encasement (6-piece bonus): Your primary skills, Elemental Arrow, Chakram, Impale, Multishot, Cluster Arrow, Companions, Vengeance, and Sentries deal 12000% increased damage for every active Sentry.
• The Shadow's Mantle (6-piece bonus): Impale deals an additional 75000% weapon damage to the first enemy hit, and 25000% to subsequent enemies.
• Bombardier’s Rucksack: You may have 2 additional Sentries. Cluster Arrow deals 150-200% increased damage.

Developer's Note: We adjusted the Demon Hunter Embodiment of the Marauder set to give it some of its legacy functionality and shifted power back to the Sentries. Additionally, we buffed The Shadow's Mantle set to make it more effective against multiple targets.

• Fixed a bug that caused Impale: Chemical Burn not to benefit from the Shadow's Mantle 6-piece bonus.

Developer's Note 11/12: We've added Cluster Arrow damage to Bombardier's Rucksack, which should make Cluster Arrow builds with the reworked Embodiment of Marauder's set more appealing. 

Necromancer

• Bones of Rathma (6-piece bonus): Each permanent active minion increases the damage of Army of the Dead by 1750%, up to 31,500%.

Developer's Note: The Necromancer's Bones Rathma set redesign has not been as strong as we had initially hoped, so we've increased its power.

Wizard

• Firebird's Finery (2-piece bonus): Disintegrate Ignites enemies, causing them to take 1500% 3000% weapon damage per second until they die. When you die, a meteor falls from the sky and revives you. This effect has a 60-second cooldown.
• Firebird's Finery (6-piece bonus): You gain 2500% 5000% increased damage while Ignite is applied to a target. Hitting an Ignited enemy with a non-channeling fire spell deals Ignite damage multiplied by Combustion stacks. Pets cannot trigger this effect

Developer's Note: The Wizard's Firebird's Finery was reborn in patch 2.7.0 and has been one of the strongest builds in the game for all activities since. It's time to reduce the power of Firebird's Finery to bring it more in line with other classes and builds.

Developer's Note 11/12: Based on player feedback, we're taking a different approach to nerfing Firebird's Finery. Rather than having pets do the heavy lifting, we want to lean into the fantasy of the player being a brawling battle mage.

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Bug Fixes

 

• Fixed a bug that prevented pets cast by the player from proccing Oculus Ring if it is equipped on a Follower.
• Fixed a bug that caused Momentum stacks to not always apply properly when using Calamity and The Ninth Cirri Satchel.
• Fixed a bug where Life per Second granted from Mantra of Healing isn't being applied to the shield generated by Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard.
• Fixed a bug where Mystic Ally: Earth Ally damage was not increased by The Crudest Boots.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Mystic Ally: Fire Ally active from attacking the Rift Guardian Perendi.

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How to Participate

To participate in the public test, you must have a Diablo III game license attached to a Battle.net account in good standing (i.e. one that hasn't been suspended or banned). In addition, you will also need to download and install the Blizzard Battle.net desktop app if you have not already done so.

Step 1: Restart the Battle.net desktop app.

Step 2: Navigate to the Diablo III tab on the left-hand menu.

Step 3: On the Diablo III screen, there is a drop-down menu right above the "Play" button (note that this may say "Install" if you do not have Diablo III currently installed). Select "PTR: Diablo III" from this drop-down menu before proceeding.

Step 4: Click Install to begin the installation process.

Your PTR account will be created automatically if you do not already have one. The PTR is available in all supported languages, and accounts from all regions are eligible to participate. For additional assistance with installing and launching the PTR, click here.

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PTR Character Copy

The option to copy your existing Diablo III characters from your live account to the PTR will be available and can be done directly through the PTR client. However, only one region per account can be copied at a time. So, if you choose to copy characters from your account in a different region, any previously copied PTR characters will be lost.

Step 1: Log into the live game and then log out.

Step 2: Log into PTR client and create a level 1 character. After you're done, return to the main character screen.

Step 3: Click on the "PTR Copy" button located in the upper right-hand corner. (The PTR Copy button will not appear in-game until you have created a new level 1 character.)

Step 4: Select your region.

Step 5: Click "Copy." This will copy all characters on your account from the selected region.

Step 6: You will be disconnected from the PTR client.

Step 7: Log back in. Your copied characters will be available for play.

Please note that you can only copy characters from one gameplay region at a time. If you choose to copy characters from a different region, any previously copied PTR characters will be lost. In addition, you can only copy characters over to your PTR account once every 24 hours. Attempting to copy characters before this cooldown is up will result in an error.

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As this is a test server, please anticipate uneven game performance, and note that restarts and downtime may occur without warning. Thank you, and we look forward to your feedback!